Women, feminism, and geek culture

A long time ago in a linkspam far, far away… (10th December, 2011)

The Wikimedia Foundation’s paid 12 month Community Fellowship positions are open for application until January 15. This time the proposals are encouraged to focus on improving editor retention and increasing participation across Wikimedia Projects, a perfect focus for people interested in increasing women’s participation.

Jailbreak the Patriarchy: Jailbreak the Patriarchy genderswaps the world for you. When it’s installed, everything you read in Chrome (except for gmail, so far) loads with pronouns and a reasonably thorough set of other gendered words swapped.

She’s Just an Attention Whore: The conversation was going well until my friend (who I always considered a pretty not sexist guy) said this: There are two types of female gamers: ones who actually like games, and ones who are just trying to get attention.

Racism And Meritocracy: What accounts for the decidedly non-diverse results in places like Silicon Valley? We have two competing theories. One is that deliberate racisms keeps people out. Another is that white men are simply the ones that show up, because of some combination of aptitude and effort… The problem with both of these theories is that the math just doesn’t work.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

2 thoughts on “A long time ago in a linkspam far, far away… (10th December, 2011)”

I missed hearing about this in August: Nancy Wake, who died in August, was a leader of the French Resistance in WWII. A New Zealander, she was trained by the British, parachuted into France, recruited members, managed group finances, and led attacks. She also rode a bicycle 500 miles through German checkpoints to replace wireless codes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Wake